Serendipitously, two things appeared in the news this week on the same day related to my work. The first is an article I submitted to the Institute for Public Relations a couple months ago. They’d asked me to write a few articles for them late last year; this is the second. “Don’t Measure Internal Communications“

The second is a recap from an event at which I spoke for PR Week — it is a teaser for a full-length article about my talk that will go up in the next print edition of the magazine. “Analytics in Action: Measurement with Meaning“

Both are based on work I’ve been doing at Bloomberg and stuff I learned from my time at IBM. I’m really happy that some of the strategic work I’ve done for these firms is finding an interested audience outside of the company — and really happy that Bloomberg has encouraged me to share.

If you are moved to do so, please pass along the links to anyone you know who might be interested.

Like this:

Many people will tell you otherwise, but if you really want to enhance your credibility as a consultant on all things digital communications, just hold a giant piece of paper in your hand. True story. It works!

More importantly, I got to talk with three incredibly interesting people: Heide Gardner, Dawn Lyon, and Tracy Chou. Here’s the session description:

The focus of this conversation will be to understand how employees are activating change within their companies and what leaders can do to work with them more effectively. We will explore questions such as: What is employee activism? How do you identify and work with employee activists? What are the advantages for organizations that proactively work with their employee activists? Page Up Member, Ethan McCarty, will moderate a panel with Tracy Chou, co-founder of Project Include who will discuss her role as an employee activist when she was with Pinterest. They will be joined by Dawn Lyon who will explain how Glassdoor encourages companies to make changes in their workplaces and share research on what today’s employees want most. Heide Gardner of Interpublic will describe her extensive experiences with multi-cultural Employee Resource Groups.

Like this:

My pal, David Berger, gave me a call after he saw my post yesterday about jobs and networks. I always love to talk with David – he’s the kind of guy who is fun to think with. In the course of the conversation he reminded me of a (now defunct?) program I led in its early stages at IBM called the Expertise Locator which was a web service that matched IBM’s subject matter experts to various pages on the company’s website. After finding a match in topic, it would then publish to the page a “widget” that displayed the expert’s bio, their picture, their latest blog/tweet etc. on the relevant subject and, in some cases, a way to get in touch with them. The system was based on the “three Cs” – no, not a description of my high school report cards – Content, Contacts and Context. The static webpages about various products and services were the content, the universe of IBM experts was the set of contacts and our matching engine stitched together the context.

David and I got to talking about how such a system could work in the world of talent strategies for big companies and how to express that to employees and so on – we both have roles in which conveying a sense of career path and growth to large swaths of people (as well as within our own teams) is pretty fundamental. Now, when we built the Expertise Locator at IBM we didn’t have access to anything like the Watson API, but if I built such a thing today – thinking about careers and jobs – I would want to make that “context” matching engine a lot smarter than the keyword-matching we did back in the day.

The Career Locator would be trained on a particular person’s digital ephemera – her professional social media posts, her work product (documents, emails, presentations etc), her social media network connections – and thus build a dynamic profile of who this person is in a professional context. The system would likewise be trained on the hiring team’s work product (their Jira board, their shared drives, their Slack channels etc etc) as well as the team members’ individual professional digital artifacts. All this stuff changes over time – like, if you looked at the content that the dozen-or-so folks on my team create every day (especially if you include instant messages) you’d be able to get a very good sense of who we are and how we work and how our work flow varies too. Now you have two very dynamic portraits that a smart algorithm could match and, especially within an organization, suggest new opportunities to people based on fit with a team.

Just recently we posted a job in my group and got more than 400 applications. Now granted, probably only about 90 were credible (Why does everyone think they can do comms? I dunno. I really dunno.) But still, three out of the four finalists for the role ended up being people who came in through a shared connection (not through the website) and, ultimately, the person we hired was one of them too. I am sure you can think of a zillion examples like this. Your network is probably smarter than you when it comes to knowing what a good job and culture fit looks like for you. It’s a bit like an arranged marriage – sometimes the parents really do have a better sense of who’d be a fit for you than your romantic (but naïve) notions of what you want and what would really provide you with satisfaction. The same is true of hiring teams and managers — their work product and digital artifacts may provide much better clues to who will fit in the team than their personal estimation, which is often biased by the recency and urgency of whatever pain they are feeling today.

Anyway, if there isn’t a smart startup out there doing this, please get going already, will ya? I am ready with seed money. Ok, I have like $73.47, but still.

I’ve thought this way about my career for a long time…that the “role” I have at any given time is much less important than the work I can do and my understanding of & connection to a strong network.

What’s really going on? In a simple phrase our organizations have become a “network of teams,” and they no longer function well in the functional hierarchy of the past. The concept of a formal “job” with a job description is starting to go away. We now hire people to do “work;” we source them for skills and capabilities (not necessarily credentials); and we manage people around projects, customers, and products, not “roles.”